


If I Only Could

by maybethrice



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Retellings, Mystery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-18
Updated: 2016-11-18
Packaged: 2018-08-31 15:54:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8584528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybethrice/pseuds/maybethrice
Summary: Ten years after Jon is called south to join his royal siblings in King's Landing, he returns in deep autumn to find his childhood home a ruin, all but one of his cousins dead, and the North on the precipice of disaster.A retelling of the 'The Six Swans'.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I've been fussing with this idea in some form or another for the last ~six weeks, and I think I am finally (??) ready to breathe life into it and let it fly on its own. It's a WIP for now, but I'm optimistic about my chances of getting it wrapped up in 3-4 parts! :) 
> 
> Shout out to riahchan, who has been enthusiastically championing this idea while I have been FRETTING about how to write it! I will work very hard not to let you down.

*

The stillness of the North was the first thing to give Jon pause on their journey northward. Market towns that ought to have been making swift and robust trade were deserted, and even the merchant caravans carrying the bounty of the autumn harvest from the south seemed to drop off once the Riverlands turned to marsh and gave way to the frostbitten landscapes of the North. The Kingsroad was abandoned, though the autumn snow was not yet so deep as to block the road, and Jon saw little evidence of banditry to dissuade travelers.

In fact, Jon thought that the whole of the north seemed somehow dimmer than his memory allowed. For all the years he had stubbornly held it as his true home, even amidst the relative comfort of the south, it had seemed distant and magical. 

But now they passed abandoned farmland and found gaunt, mistrustful people crowded into towns, though it was not yet winter. They watched Jon and his companions with skeptical half-stares as they passed them by, and by the time the spires of Winterfell appeared in the distance, the entire royal delegation seemed to have fallen victim to the same apathy that polluted Jon’s homeland. 

“A strange place you come from,” observed the young maester at Jon’s side, clad in grey and looking uncomfortable on the back of his horse. His small eyes followed Jon, though, and he urged his gelding to fall into step beside Jon’s now-skittish stallion. “Was it always like this?”

“No.” Jon had not meant to be curt with his friend — Sam always meant well, even when he tried to draw out the things that Jon would otherwise keep to himself. He looked around at the dying fields and broken fences around them and tightened his grip on his rein. No, the North had been a warm place, where people were generous and steadfast. Where he had been loved. 

Jon looked away from the ruined farm. “But maybe it only seemed brighter then.” 

Jon’s childhood had been a happy one, living with his mother and her family in Winterfell. Lady Lyanna had been well loved in the north before she left for the south with a feckless Targaryen prince, and that love had in no way diminished when she returned a year later with a baseborn son. Jon had grown up in a cocoon of warmth and affection, playing with cousins and exploring darkened woods that had then seemed fantastical and mysterious. 

It was a comfortable world that dissipated not with his mother’s death, but with the Queen Regent’s sun-and-dragon sealed letter that insisted that Rhaegar’s youngest child join his half-siblings in King’s Landing half a year later.

Jon recalled the acute pain of leaving behind his uncle and cousins, but neither the lingering grief for his mother, nor the long journey to King’s Landing could have prepared him for the life that waited for him there. Gone were the days of gentle sweetness from aunt, stroking his hair when he fell asleep sharing a bed with Robb. Gone was his uncle’s warm affection, his cousins’ laughter. Even the sharp cold of the north, which had only ever seemed cause to pull in closer to those he loved. 

Courtly intrigue was as common in the Red Keep as his sword practice had been in Winterfell. Queen Elia was not cruel to him, but as a conspiracy brewed against her and her children, she had as much reason to keep him within her sight as she did to do so at arm’s length. Jon had written his uncle, Lord Stark, futilely begging him to be allowed to return home. 

“No sign of bandits,” Sam continued, echoing Jon’s earlier thoughts as he examined the road to Wintertown.

“No sign of the people, either.” Jon looked back toward the fields and his horse cantered sideways to avoid a puddle of fetid slush. The thatch roof of the nearest farm house had collapsed with rot. “The farms are abandoned. The merchant wagons won’t travel this far north.” 

He didn’t continue, but dread pooled in his gut as they rode past Wintertown and on to the gates of Winterfell. Here they were greeted by a sharp yell from the walls, but the guard’s crossbow lowered when Jon’s standard gave a weak flutter in the stillness around them. 

“Lord Snow,” he heard whispered in a hush. “Prince Jon,” on another. 

When Lord Stark died not three years after Jon was called south, it had been the end of regular word from Winterfell. Lady Catelyn withdrew from life in the North, leaving Robb to assume the duties of the Lord of Winterfell at the tender age of fourteen. Young Jon had been certain that Robb would do his duty to the best of his abilities, was convinced that nothing about Winterfell could change, even without his mother, uncle and aunt.

But when the gate was opened and Jon dismounted in Winterfell’s courtyard, cold dread bubbled up in his chest, as though it had been waiting for him to notice it. Ten years and unspeakable tragedy had changed the place Jon called home in his heart. The towers of Winterfell were overgrown with ivy that flamed a riotous array of colors, clambering over the tattered direwolf banners that hung on the walls of the keep. The much-longed for laughter of cousins was absent, for they had all grown and Robb had not lived to marry and father children of his own.

 _I should have come home sooner,_ thought Jon, gripping the leather rein of his horse in his hand. The stallion gave an irritated snort and pawed at the spare ground. A stone loosened. Jon kicked it away before the horse ruined himself in his agitation.

“Prince Jon.” The cracked voice was familiar, but Jon barely recognized Winterfell’s withered steward when he cautiously stepped down from the great hall. “The gods alone knew if you were truly coming, if you might survive—”

“Of course I came,” said Jon instantly, ignoring the prickling sensation of the hair on his neck standing on end. If he might survive. Like the other Starks hadn’t. Robb, Arya, Bran, little Rickon. 

Jon stopped himself. “Where is my cousin?” 

Poole hesitated, his foot dragging across the last crumbling stair, and Jon thought he might fall, but he recovered with a grimace. “Lady Stark is in the godswood,” he explained with the sound of a far greater apology. “I fear she will not return until long after dark.”

In another time, he would have been taken to the great hall to be greeted as a guest by the lord or lady of Winterfell, or met by the household and all his family in the courtyard before he could even dismount his horse. But Winterfell was changed, as Jon himself was changed. 

“I am happy to go to her directly,” offered Jon with a quirk of his brow. He recalled that Sansa kept to the Seven, as her mother had. But the sept Lord Stark had built his southron bride was decrepit with apparent disuse, and perhaps Sansa had changed. Enough to wander the godswood alone so close to dark. “I should pay my own respects at the heart tree.”

“Lady Stark is in prayer,” said Poole instantly, but he did not look comfortable with the lie and Jon did not challenge him on it. 

“But perhaps you would prefer to rest, my lord,” the old steward recovered. At Jon’s curt nod, he bowed his head and gestured for a young boy to come forward and take the reins from his hand.

A few of Jon’s men followed after the boy, leading Sam’s horse along after Jon’s, and the two were led through winding corridors to their chambers. Sam immediately volunteered himself to the more modest room to the left of Jon’s larger.

“These were Lord Brandon’s rooms,” explained Poole cautiously, his gloved hands tightly clasped behind him. “The elder, of course — Lord Eddard’s brother.”

Jon thanked him, though there was a thin layer of dust that clung to the well-worn patina of the furniture, and it seemed that his uncle’s apartments had not been used for many years. 

Sam waited for Poole’s footsteps to fade from the hallway before he turned on Jon with a worried crinkle on his forehead. “Gods. _Jon._ They told me it might be bad, but I—what happened here?”

“That’s what we’ve come to find out, Sam.” Jon crossed the room to the desk that stood prominently in the corner of the room, an enormous thing that bore the workmanship of a talented artist in the carvings along its sides. A pack of wolves twisted around one another in the hunt, dancing across the dark wood, seeking their prey in a whirl of snow. 

_Winter is coming._

The words echoed hollowly in Jon’s mind. Meaningless things he’d borne proudly in his youth, when his mother dressed him in gray and white and smiled down at him when she said them. _‘Winter is coming,’_ as if this meant Jon himself. Now, they only seemed like the dire warning of autumn, foretelling consequences too long ignored. 

He stared down at the blank parchment and half-empty inkpot that sat on the desk. At least someone had thought to set this out, for he would need to send word to the king soon. But what could he say, except to confirm what Aegon had already known from half a dozen letters from the northern lords? Without the custodial care of the Warden of the North, the region was sliding dangerously into chaos. 

But at least Aegon was trying to prevent that, Jon thought, even as he wondered if his loyalty to the throne was being tested. It was no secret that Aegon hoped to name Jon his Hand, or that the former Queen Regent had vehemently opposed his appointment. Despite the good rapport Jon held with his half-brother, he had no reason to believe that Queen Elia had come to trust him. But, then, it had only been a handful of years since Prince Viserys conspired to kill his brother’s wife and their children to take the throne himself. 

Beside the sputtering fire, just lit and too weak to produce any warmth, Sam frowned at Jon. “What is she like?” he asked softly, his voice no stronger than their fire. “Your cousin. The new Lady Stark.”

A good question. Better even than Sam could have known, if truth be told. 

Jon tried to think of the girl who lived in Winterfell with him, but Sansa had belonged to her mother, from the gods she worshipped to the fashions she aspired to. She’d seemed a bit silly as a girl, doting on her mother and chasing after her aunt’s apron strings. Jon couldn’t even remember what she might have said to him on the day he rode for King’s Landing. But what would she be like now, when she had been left alone in the world?

“I’m not sure anymore. I haven’t seen her since she was a girl,” said Jon from the desk without lifting his head. His fingertips were white against the thickly-grained wood. What _did_ he know, after all, that could help him accomplish what he’d come to do?

Sam looked dimly annoyed, an expression he managed only in the way he lifted his eyebrows at Jon. They’d met when Sam was still in training, when he’d come to King’s Landing for some research, and remained in contact for the remaining years of his study in the Citadel. Sam’s letters had been Jon’s only connection outside King’s Landing, and they had become fast friends over years and miles of parchment. When Aegon sent him North, it had been an easy concession to send Sam with him.

“Well, then,” sighed Sam, abandoning his pointed look in Jon’s direction. “Perhaps she’ll return from the godswood earlier than expected.”

But Sansa did not return early. She did not, in fact, appear to return at all, for though Jon had asked that he be woken when she did, no one came to him in the night. 

Jon woke just before dawn and briskly washed himself with a basin of scalding water that one of the maids brought to him before bowing and fleeing the room without speaking. In his youth, the entire household rose hours before dawn to build fires, cook meals, clean stalls and tend the horses, and a bustled after hundred other tasks that Jon could only guess at. Lady Stark was often awake by the time he crept out of his room, already dressed and directing her household, and Jon half-expected to find his aunt in the corridors of Winterfell, offering him a distracted half-smile between instructions as he passed. 

Now, the keep was eerily quiet when he picked his way through empty, neglected corridors. A few skittish, frightened maidservants cleared a path for him as he passed, gasping softly and passing whispers behind their hands. Jon tried not to heed them as he found his way from his rooms to the crypts of Winterfell, where his mother had been buried. It was cold and gray outside, threatening another day of wet, autumn snow that would freeze hard when darkness came creeping from the east.

When he’d left Winterfell, Lady Lyanna’s tomb was the newest, after Brandon and old Lord Rickard’s, and her stone effigy had not yet been completed. Now, there were three statues that Jon did not know. Lyanna, his mother, was the first. It was a good likeness, even if it did not capture the wild joy she carried like a flag unfurled and snapping in a sharp wind. Lord Eddard, hollow-eyed and stiff, his great, stone sword unsheathed and set over his knees. Lady Catelyn was still, colder than Jon remembered her in life.

When he finished at each, lit pungent incense at their feet and murmured the correct invocation, Jon looked past them and saw a row of unfilled tombs where Eddard and Catelyn’s other children should have been. Jon set aside the incense he’d brought for them and extended his fingers to touch where their names should have been carved. But the stone there was smooth and unblemished, as though no one had given the order for the Stark children to be buried with the rest of their family.

It chilled Jon to think that his cousins might not have been laid to rest as they ought. That there may not have been an opportunity. He lit the rest of the incense at the foot of his mother’s tomb and left the crypts, wrapping himself tighter in his cloak.

If anyone had ever known the truth of what had happened to Robb Stark and three of his siblings, they had surely taken the secret of it to their grave. Some believed them dead of a sickness that prowled the North some years before, and the chaos a poor cover to keep the waning House Stark in power. Others whispered of a conspiracy involving Faceless Men and Lady Sansa’s unspeakable betrayal. Still more argued that the Starks were born of wolves, wargs and beasts, and had simply melted back into the forest when their wild instincts could no longer be denied. But without a single thread of truth to stitch these fantastical stories together, Jon had very little idea what had happened to his cousins, even years after they had vanished. 

This unproductive spiral was interrupted by Winterfell’s steward manifesting at Jon’s side with a half bow and a formal greeting that Jon did not entirely hear. 

“—she’ll need to have breakfast and a bath, of course,” he went on, as Jon blinked over at him. “But I think you will be able to come to her solar then.”

Jon realized with a start that he must have been talking about Sansa, who had apparently only just returned from the godswood. “Was Sansa in the godswood all night? Without anyone with her at all?” 

Poole looked profoundly uncomfortable, avoiding Jon’s stare as he led him to a covered corridor that connected one section of the keep to another. “I would not usually recommend it, the dangers in the wood and all, but she—well, she is a Stark, after all.” 

As if that was explanation enough.

“That’s a rather cavalier way to regard Lady Stark’s wellbeing,” Jon retorted sharply, but he was not angry, only surprised. The North was dangerous at the best of times, and nothing about the state of Winterfell indicated that the North could be in any way considered at its best. “I’ll see her the moment she’s ready for a visitor.”

But it was mid-morning before Poole found Jon with Sam in the library, where the maester was quietly examining the castle’s collection. “There might be something useful here, you don’t know,” he’d protested when Jon remarked that the Citadel surely had a more complete collection of books than Winterfell. 

“Is she ready?” asked Jon when Poole rose from his bow, his hands once again clasped behind him.

“Of course. Though I must tell you...” Poole cleared his throat politely, looking to the planked wood beneath his boots rather than up to Jon. “Lady Stark may not speak with you. She hardly speaks at all.”

“I would see her anyway, if you don’t mind, Poole.” Jon had the impression that a smile would only make Poole less comfortable than he already was, but he tried to soften the severity of his features when he stared back at the man and said, “She is, after all, the only of my mother’s family that remains to me now.”

All of Poole’s posture snapped upward at the mention of Jon’s mother, as if in all his formal graces for a prince of the realm, he had forgotten just who Jon was. Poole’s shoulders slumped forward. “Of course, Jon. I only thought — I only thought to warn you before you saw her.”

With this, he beckoned for Jon to follow him into the dark, half-lit corridor that led to the family’s residence. Across the courtyard, one of the towers was burnt black and the oily, pungent smell of smoke lingered throughout the keep, even where the stones were scrubbed clean. Sam’s boots scuffled on the stone behind them, as if something had surprised him, but Jon did not turn to see. 

The corridor was drafty and it had already begun to snow outside, promising that it would become truly cold before long. He shrugged his cloak higher onto his shoulders and frowned up at the triple-bolted door that Poole unlocked with a ring of keys at his waist.

“Does my cousin think this necessary within the walls of Winterfell itself?” asked Jon sharply. 

“These are dangerous times,” explained the steward, when he turned and saw Jon’s dark expression. He lowered his hand to the doorknob. “Winter is coming, my lord.”

“Such a charming place,” muttered Sam behind Jon, soft enough so only he could hear under the dull thud of Poole’s heavy shove at the door. 

The corridor beyond it was lit by a torch at the very end. Poole brought them to a room that Jon remembered was his uncle’s study, but he had barely enough time to scrape his eyes across the familiar decor before they turned to the young woman seated primly in a carved wood chair beside the massive, empty fireplace.

In an instant, Jon knew that weeks of preparing himself for a reunion with his long-estranged cousin had been for nothing. One foot fell behind the other in a staggered retreat before freezing to the floor. 

Sansa rose and fell into the regal sweep of a formal bow in a single, elegant movement. Though her face was turned to the floor, Jon could see that she was the very image of her mother. She straightened, and the difference between her and Lady Catelyn was immediately apparent. She was colder, like the stone effigy in the crypts, deeply haunted, and terribly beautiful. 

As Poole had predicted, she did not speak, but Sansa did examine him as thoroughly, her eyes lingering over every part of Jon before looking past him to Sam for an instant. She nodded curtly to Poole, and the steward left them. She looked to Sam, and then to Jon again, and did not speak. Jon understood anyway.

“Thank you, Sam,” he said, forcing his voice to sound light. “I’ll find you in the library when I’ve had a chance to speak with Lady Stark.”

When Sam was gone, the door closed tight behind him, Sansa made a soft, inhuman whine and threw herself at him, crushing her face into the thick, black fur of Jon’s cloak. Her hands were thin and very white, except for the tiny, bloodied pricks across her palms and fingertips, and they felt along his shoulders and neck before cupping the sides of Jon’s face. The tears she blinked back suggested that did not seem to believe that he was real.

 _I am her only family left,_ realized Jon. _She is all of my family I have left._ He uncoiled his arms from hers and embraced her tightly. She was thin under her gown, and very cold, but she did not wear a cloak and the fireplace looked as though it had not been used in many, many months. 

“You came,” she said from beside his ear, but her voice was hoarse with disuse and softer than the sound of snow falling. “Everyone will be so glad.”

*

The tea that was brought when Jon called for something warm was strong-scented and herbal and Jon dismissed the maid when she set down a crock of honey. He felt stilted and stiff as he poured for them, but this at least gave him something to do while Sansa watched him stir thick globs of honey into her tea, silent except to offer polite thanks in her thin, scratchy voice.

“Thank you,” said Sansa very politely when he passed the steaming, stone cup to her. She regarded it curiously, but gripped it very tightly between sips. “How did you know how I liked my tea?” 

“I didn’t,” admitted Jon with a furrow in his brow. If not for all outward appearances, Sansa’s courtesy could have deceived him that she was well. “My sister — that is, Princess Rhaenys — likes it this way. I thought…”

“You thought well,” Sansa praised when his words fell off to silence. She then drank deeply from the cup, pausing to swirl the remaining leaves around the bottom, but she did not speak. The weighty silence did not seem to bother her, either, though her fingers twitched a little toward the basket of needlework at her side.

The furniture in the previous Lord Stark’s study had not changed from Jon’s memory, and it was very clean, but Jon thought that everything looked worn and faded out. It was as though something had drawn the light and color from his memory and left him only with the barest remnants of a once-happy place. Sansa herself was a dimmer version his memory, her clothes simpler and without the flair for southron fashion. Her hair was simply braided and pinned so that not even the thick, red plait would fall in her way. 

Finally, Jon cleared his throat, setting aside his half-drunk cup. “I should not have waited so long to come.” 

Sansa looked up to him and he could see that her eyes were as vibrantly blue as he remembered, and they teemed with a hundred unknowable emotions. “They wouldn’t have let you come,” she said softly. “Robb always said it must have been so, if you never came back.” 

It wasn’t quite an accusation, but Jon felt it pierce like one. Had he been held hostage in King’s Landing? If he’d only asked, surely Aegon would have relented, if not Queen Elia. If he’d asked when his uncle had died, or his aunt, or even Robb and the others, surely he would have been allowed to go home again. 

Except he hadn’t. 

It was Aegon who called him to his council chambers alone and presented him with a letter, signed by the lords of the North, and asked him to go and be his eyes and ears and hands. And when Jon asked him why he was to be sent, Aegon had only smiled sadly and said, “There is no one else I could trust with this.” 

And so he’d gone north. 

“I should have come,” repeated Jon quietly, turning his hands over. “You shouldn’t have been alone these last few years.” 

Sansa shifted in her chair, her fingers twitching toward her embroidery again. Her stitching had been beautiful as a girl, but the light was not strong enough for Jon to see what it was she worked on. “I wasn’t alone,” she finally murmured, when her fingers closed into a soft fist and balled up in her lap.

“Do you mean Poole and — and I suppose Jeyne has been around.” 

This drew a smile to Sansa’s face, but it was thin and a little sad. “Did you know Jeyne is married now?” She reached into the basket and finally pulled out her stitching, which she unfolded in her lap, softly counting her stitches before resuming her work without looking up again. “She married one of Lord Glover’s boys just a few moons before the raven for autumn came. They’ve — she’s a babe at her breast already.”

“Didn’t Robb arrange for you to marry?” She would have been fifteen when the other Starks died. Young enough to wait for her wedding, but old enough that she might benefit from a betrothal. Surely it would have made the years easier for her if she’d been allowed to grieve properly and begin again with a husband and family of her own, rather than hold together a shell the shell that was Winterfell.

“No,” whispered Sansa and Jon watched as her wistful smile died on her face. A cold expression took its place, a frozen mask slipped neatly over her pain.

This was too much, to see the once-bright Sansa reduced to a shadow of herself. Jon abandoned his chair, took her hand into his own and was unable to resist the instinct to rub warmth into her cold fingers. He was close enough to see now that the embroidery in her lap was a tunic, intricately sewn and decorated with direwolves and snow. It was beautiful, but there was something desperately lonely about it. And there, if he looked carefully among her flawless stitches, were small pricks of blood on her embroidery, rusty and slightly smeared from where she had worked through the savaging of her hands with her needle.

When her fingers had warmed in his hands, Jon looked up to her and asked, “What happened to them all?” 

Sansa did not even seem surprised that he asked, for her expression was weary rather than surprised, but she did not answer except to flutter her eyelashes toward the cold stone beneath them. A thin cloud of mist formed between them from her wavering breath. She shook her head once, to indicate she would not say.

“It’s all right, Sansa,” he sighed and pulled her into his arms, though nothing seemed like it could be _all right_ ever again. An empty promise he had no way of keeping.

And when she finally drew away from him, long before Jon himself felt comforted, Sansa only wiped the tears from her cheeks and took up her embroidery again.


End file.
